professional communities and professional development - working

Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School

W O R K I N GP A P E R

B E S TPRACTICESN E A R E S E A R C H

Judith Warren LittleUniversity of California, Berkeley

December 2006

Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School

Judith Warren LittleUniversity of California, Berkeley

December 2006

W O R K I N GP A P E R

B E S TPRACTICESN E A R E S E A R C H

The views presented in this publication should not be construed as representing the policy orposition of the National Education Association. The publication expresses the views of its authorand is intended to facilitate informed discussion by educators, policymakers, and others inter-ested in educational reform.

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Copyright © 2006 by the National Education AssociationAll Rights Reserved

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iii

The Author

Judith Warren Little is Carol Liu Professor of Education Policy in the Graduate School ofEducation at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on teachers’ work andcareers, the contexts of teaching, and policies and practices of professional development.Dr. Little is an elected member of the National Academy of Education.

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Contents

The School’s Stake in Teacher Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Four Goals for Teacher Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Why Focus on the School? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Professional Development Rooted in Goals and Problems of Teaching and Learning . . . . . . 4

Problems of Practice and the Instructional Triangle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

From Problems of Practice to Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Building Subject Knowledge for Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Focusing on Students’ Thinking and Evidence of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Preparing for Student Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Professional Community in Support of Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

What Professional Community Is and Why It Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Cultivating Professional Community for Teacher Learning and School Improvement . . . . 16

Linking Professional Development and Professional Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Investing in High-Quality Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

1

This paper focuses on professional development and pro-fessional community as foundations of the learning-cen-tered school. Its purpose is to marshal research evidencethat can be used productively to enhance professionallearning and thereby to nourish such a school. To establishbenchmarks for best practice, the paper begins with anoverview of the goals that professional learning serves,suggests strategic content priorities, and ends with a dis-cussion of effective approaches or means. It is addressed toschool leaders—especially teachers and administrators—who must identify priorities for professional developmentand allocate scarce professional development resources in

ways that will improve instruction and enhance children’ssuccess in school.

As will become apparent, the research is uneven (for arecent review, see Borko 2005). We know more about thecharacteristics of high-quality formal professional devel-opment (typically outside the school) than we do aboutthe content, processes, and outcomes of ongoing, informal

For more than two decades, research has shown that teachers who experience frequent,

rich learning opportunities have in turn been helped to teach in more ambitious and

effective ways. Yet few teachers gain access to such intensive professional learning opportu-

nities.1 More typically, teachers experience professional development as episodic, superficial,

and disconnected from their own teaching interests or recurring problems of practice. This

prevailing pattern—a few rich opportunities, many disappointing ones—speaks both to the

promise and to the limitations of professional development, as it is typically organized. An

important part of this enduring story centers on the schools and districts where teachers

work and whether they are positioned well to foster professional learning opportunities that

enhance the quality of teaching and learning.

1 The evidence is consistent on this point. See findings from the nationallyrepresentative survey of elementary, middle, and high school teachersreported by Garet and others (2001) and the study of elementary teachers’participation in mathematics professional development conducted by Cohenand Hill (2001).

workplace learning. We know a substantial amount abouthow to help teachers become effective in helping studentslearn core academic subjects (especially math and sci-ence), but our knowledge tends to come up short whenthose students are also learning English as a second lan-guage. We know more about the benefits of strong studentassessment practices than we do about how to help teach-ers incorporate such practices into daily instruction. Wehave begun to assemble rich portraits of teaching thatresponds to and builds on student diversity in ways thatsupport student learning, but we have little in the way ofresearch on related programs of professional develop-ment. The research provides more guidance for schools insome areas than in others—or, put another way, the les-sons from research do not map neatly or completely ontothe professional learning needs or interests of a givenschool. Nonetheless, it provides a worthy starting point.

The School’s Stake in Teacher LearningThe basic premise of this paper is that a school is morelikely to be effective in supporting high levels of studentlearning and well-being when it also plays a powerful,deliberate, and consequential role in teacher learning. Asthe context most directly connected to the daily enterpriseof teaching and learning, the school has a stake in pursu-ing professional development purposes that together buildthe individual and collective expertise and commitment ofthe staff, sustain professional growth for both novice andveteran teachers, and equip the school to tackle its mostcentral goals, priorities, and problems.

Four Goals for Teacher LearningThe school’s stake in teacher learning may be expressed interms of a set of four broad, ambitious goals that join theneeds and interests of individual teachers to the collectiveneeds and interests of the school.

Making Headway on the School’s Central Goals, Priorities, or ProblemsA key test of professional development lies in its capacity tomount a strong collective response to schoolwide problemsor goals. Some of these problems and goals arise out of abroad policy agenda affecting all schools—raising the barof educational achievement and closing the achievementgap. Other problems and goals arise from teachers’ and par-ents’ interest in educational benefits that go beyond meas-ured academic achievement in tested subjects: students’overall intellectual growth; their social, moral, and politicaldevelopment; their independence and self-confidence; their

aesthetic sensitivity; and more. Finally, some problems andgoals arise out of the specific circumstances of each school.For example, schools in some areas have experienced aflood of non-English-speaking immigrants over the pasttwo decades and reasonably expect that all or most teacherswill acquire expertise in teaching second-language learners.A well-wrought school plan would show evidence that pro-fessional development forms one part of a larger strategyfor pursuing ambitious levels of teaching and learning inthis school, with these students, in this community, andwith these resources.

Building the Knowledge, Skill, and Disposition to Teach to High Standards The quality of a school’s teaching staff can be judged by thedepth and breadth of knowledge, skill, and judgment thatteachers bring to their work, both individually and collec-tively. Sound hiring practices offer one resource in thisrespect, but hiring well-qualified teachers will not be suffi-cient to meet this goal. Insights into teachers’ expertise andtheir learning trajectories have multiplied as researchershave uncovered the complexities of teaching and the cog-nitive and social demands associated with learning to teachwell. Thus, one test of effective professional development iswhether teachers and other educators come to know moreover time about their subjects, students, and practice andto make informed use of what they know.

Cultivating Strong Professional CommunityConducive to Learning and ImprovementResearch has steadily converged on the importance ofstrong teacher learning communities for teacher growthand commitment, suggesting as well their potential contri-bution to favorable student outcomes. Schools whose staffmembers espouse a shared responsibility for studentlearning and are organized to sustain a focus on instruc-tional improvement are more likely to yield higher levelsof student learning. Creating and sustaining robust pro-fessional learning communities is difficult, but researchprovides examples of what such communities look likeand helps illuminate the conditions that place them with-in reach. Effective professional development might thus bejudged by its capacity for building (and building on) thestructures and values, as well as the intellectual and lead-ership resources, of professional community.

Sustaining Teachers’ Commitment to TeachingIndividuals experience professional development at particu-lar points in a teaching career and in conditions that bolster

2 Professional Community and Professional Development

or erode commitment to teaching over time. Here, the testof professional development lies in teachers’ access to pro-fessional opportunities that afford them satisfaction, sup-port, and stimulation appropriate to their stage of careerand that make good use of their acquired expertise andexperience. Recent studies of teaching careers, derived pri-marily from in-depth biographical interviews, emphasizethe meanings that individuals attach to their work, the kindsof professional responsibilities they seek, and the identitiesand relationships they form. These studies draw attention tooverlooked intersections of professional career and profes-sional development (e.g., how particular teaching assign-ments build on, stimulate, or frustrate teacher learning).Such studies seem particularly consistent with recent initia-tives in the support and assessment of beginning teachersand the cultivation of networks, teacher research groups,and other manifestations of professional community.

Why Focus on the School?Despite talk of “site-based staff development,” mostorganized professional development activity takes placeoutside the school. Furthermore, in an era of heightenedaccountability pressures, more districts are exercising con-trol over professional development, thus constrainingfunds and staff time at the school level. Yet an alternativevision of teacher learning is emerging from the research.School-based professional communities are the core of thesystem; these are purposefully and coherently linked withexternal professional development opportunities.

Why focus on the school? First, and most simply, the school is where the work of

teaching and learning resides. It is where the problems ofpractice take on a particular face, where pressures forachievement are most directly felt, and where investmentsin professional learning pay off or do not. To focus on theschool is to sustain attention to improvements in teachingand learning and to signal a broad conception of profes-sional development encompassing “the full range of activ-ities, formal and informal, that engage teachers or admin-istrators in new learning about their professional practice”(Knapp 2003, p. 112). The school looms large not becauseit is the site of formal professional development activity(although it may be) but because its staff have a stake inthinking wisely and strategically about whether and howthe school is organized to invest in professional learning.

Second, the school is important because a school’s fail-ure to create an environment conducive to professionallearning has high costs. Students bear those costs in theform of inadequate instruction and high teacher turnover.

Teachers bear the costs in the form of weak instructionalsupport and personal stress. In contrast, schools that arewell organized for professional learning stand to reap thebenefits of demonstrable student gains and enduringteacher commitment. Over the past two decades, evidencehas accumulated that the workplace learning environmentmatters. Schools that support teacher learning and foster aculture of collegiality and continuous improvement arebetter able to support and retain new teachers, pursueinnovation, respond effectively to external changes, andsecure teacher commitment (Johnson and others 2004;Little 1982, 2003; Little and Bartlett 2002; Louis and Kruse1995; McLaughlin and Talbert 1994, 2001; Rosenholtz1989).

Corresponding to the four goals for teacher learningoutlined above, conceptions of professional developmentin education have both broadened and deepened over thepast two decades. We have moved from a model thatemphasized the acquisition of discrete skills and behaviorsto a more complex vision of teacher thinking, learning,and practice in particular subject domains. We havemoved increasingly away from an individualistic view ofteacher growth and toward a view that emphasizes aschool’s collective capacity and that credits the potentialpower of strong professional community. We haveacknowledged the ways in which teachers’ career experi-ence and teaching commitments are shaped by the qualityof the workplace environment and by the nature andextent of their professional ties. In addition, in manyschools and districts, professional development planninghas matured. Plans that were once a laundry list of activi-ties are more often framed in terms of explicit linksbetween student learning goals and expenditure of profes-sional development resources.

It is true that school-level changes emerging from thesebodies of research have been slow in developing. The mostambitious examples of powerful teacher learning remainrelatively rare and modest in scale. Not all practitionerscan say that they have frequent and meaningful contactswith colleagues or consultants or that they have been rich-ly supplied with stimulating ideas, materials, and experi-ences. Indeed, many would readily report being “in-serv-iced” in ways that do little justice to their experience, inter-ests, and circumstances. Patterns of local resource alloca-tion at both the school and district levels have tended tofavor traditional training models over promising but unfa-miliar alternatives. Large districts are more likely thansmaller ones to offer intensive, sustained professionaldevelopment. Few schools or districts conduct meaningful

In the Learning-Centered School 3

evaluation of the benefits derived from professional devel-opment activity. Yet meaningful shifts are evident. Table 1summarizes the direction of these shifts in the form ofstrategic benchmarks for professional development andprofessional community at the school level.

Of course, no school exists in a vacuum. Schools areembedded in relationships that directly or indirectly affectteachers’ work and professional development—relation-ships with school districts, the state, professional associa-tions, reform organizations, and various professionaldevelopment providers or partners. In particular, schooldistricts have assumed growing importance as a contextfor professional learning and as a source of both resourcesand requirements for teaching. Although this paper cen-ters on the school, it does so with the understanding thatthe school’s ability to support teachers’ professional learn-ing depends both on its internal resources and on its exter-nal connections and relationships.

Professional Development Rooted in GoalsAnd Problems of Teaching and LearningEducators and researchers have lambasted the scattered,shallow, fragmented array of activity that so often makesup the professional development landscape, reserving spe-cial criticism for activities that seem remote from teachers’priorities and problems of practice. In a paper commis-sioned for the National Commission on Teaching andAmerica’s Future, Ball and Cohen (1999) acknowledgedthis long-standing problem and offered a remedy: design-ing professional development more persuasively “in andfrom practice” (p. 10):

Rarely do…in-services seem based on a cur-ricular view of teachers’ learning. Teachers arethought to need updating rather than oppor-tunities for serious and sustained learning ofcurriculum, students, and teaching.…

Hence, we propose new ways to understandand use practice as a site for professional learn-ing, as well as ways to cultivate the sorts ofinquiry into practice from which manyteachers could learn. (Ball and Cohen 1999,pp. 3–4, 6, emphasis added.)

Problems of Practice and the Instructional Triangle When Ball and Cohen (1999) urged more opportunitiesfor teachers to learn in and from professional practice,they focused professional development squarely on what

many now term the instructional triangle: the relationshipsbetween teacher, students, and content. The instructionaltriangle encompasses the dynamic, fluid, and complexinteractions by which teachers help children learn chal-lenging subject content and pursue other important intel-lectual and social goals.

Lampert’s Teaching Problems and the Problems ofTeaching (2001) provides a compelling illumination of theinstructional triangle. Drawing from her 5th grade class-room, Lampert showed how teaching mathematicsrequired that she solve problems related not only to hergoals for students’ content learning but also—and simul-taneously—to her goals for building a classroom culturein which children can reason and argue about mathemat-ics, learn how to work both independently and collabora-tively, build up “intellectual courage,” and develop a senseof their own growing understanding and accomplishment.In working toward those ambitious ends, she had to findways to “cover the curriculum” without compromising“the complex character of content” while contending with“the complexities of human character.” Throughout thebook, the children’s encounters with problems in mathe-matics helped Lampert, as teacher, expose and work on theproblems of teaching.

Lampert’s (2001) book embodies the kind of teachingknowledge required if teachers are to help all childrenmeet ambitious standards. It also suggests the crucialimportance of professional learning opportunities that arerooted firmly and specifically in problems of practice.Finally, it demonstrates the way in which the large, seem-ingly intractable problems of student achievement andachievement gaps—the problems that pervade policydebates and that stimulate waves of reform—take on alocal and arguably more tractable face in each classroomand each school.

Consistent with the principle of organizing profession-al development in and from practice, then, a school organ-ized for teacher learning would promote systematic atten-tion to teaching and learning in multiple ways. Schoolleaders would support teachers in acquiring a deep under-standing of what it means for children to learn core con-cepts and skills in particular subject domains. School staffwould develop the habit of collectively examining evi-dence of student learning and investigating the sources ofstudents’ progress or difficulties. Teachers would be helpedto locate and participate in the best of external profession-al development opportunities and to parlay what theylearn into collective capacity in the school. Partnershipswith organizations or groups outside the school would be



Table 1. Benchmarks for Professional Community and Professional Development

Benchmarks for…

Purposes for professionaldevelopment

Content focus of profession-al development

Strategy for professionaldevelopment

Professional community asresource for professionallearning

External professional development supports

Moving from…

Individual knowledge or change

Unfocused “laundry list” of top-ics not related to school improve-ment goals

Relationship to student learningunclear, unexamined, or left upto teachers to figure out

Episodic training events on topicsoften disconnected from practice

Strategies poorly designed toachieve effect

Professional community a weakresource for professional learning

Little attention by school leadersto building strong professionalcommunity

Working conditions weakly or unevenly conducive to professional learning

Insufficient external support forteacher learning and schoolcapacity building

Moving toward…

Individual, collective, and school goals:

n Making headway on school goals and problems

n Building knowledge and skill to teach to highstandards

n Cultivating a strong professional community

n Sustaining professional commitment.

Focus on the “instructional triangle”:

n Pedagogical content knowledge

n Student thinking, learning, and assessment

n Understanding and responding to studentdiversity.

School-based professional communities are thecore; these are coherently linked with externalprofessional development opportunities.

Strategies have characteristics associated witheffectiveness: collective participation, active learn-ing, coherence, sustained duration.

Continuous learning is a school-wide norm; learn-ing is embedded in the professional community.

Cultivating professional community is a focus forschool leaders.

Working conditions are conducive to professionallearning (teaching assignment, time, space, mate-rials, and access to colleagues).

Multiple external professional developmentopportunities link school professional communi-ties with

n New advances in knowledge about subjectcontent, learning, and teaching

n Opportunities to understand students andtheir diverse communities

n Externally developed tools and materials.

strategically chosen for their contributions to professionaldevelopment and professional community.

From Problems of Practice to Professional DevelopmentWorking from the image of the instructional triangle, thefollowing sections take up three entry points for profes-sional learning. As Figure 1 shows, each represents one ofthree principal relationships in the instructional triangle;each offers a potential focus for activity within the schooland for strategic participation in programs and partner-ships beyond the school. The instructional triangle is use-ful as a strategic guide that provides a clear focus for thecontent of professional development.

The first relationship centers on teachers’ understandingof subject domains for purposes of teaching. A substantialbody of research now supplies evidence that teachers bene-fit from in-depth understanding of subject-specific con-cepts and from an understanding of how to help studentslearn them. Research on subject-specific professional devel-opment programs, sometimes in conjunction with innova-tive curricula, shows the power of intensive professional

development to deepen teachers’ understanding, alterteaching practice, and promote student learning. In partic-ular, these programs may help teachers transform basicsubject knowledge into the practical knowledge requiredfor teaching, or what Shulman (1986) termed pedagogicalcontent knowledge.

The second area of professional development activityand research centers on teachers’ grasp of students’ think-ing and learning. This relationship puts students’ interac-tion with the content of the curriculum into the fore-ground. It encompasses efforts to expand teachers’ facilitywith formative assessment as well as other initiatives thatinvolve close, collective examination of students’ thinkingby means of what students say and do and the work theyproduce. In all of these activities, an underlying assump-tion is that systematic attention to student learning—andto students’ responses to the instructional activitiesintended to promote that learning—will foster teacherlearning and improve instructional decision making.

The final relationship focuses on teachers’ understand-ing of and responsiveness to the students they teach, withspecial emphasis on understanding the nature and signifi-cance of student diversity. Of the three starting points forprofessional development, this relationship presents thebroadest terrain by encompassing the many sources ofstudent diversity—cultural, linguistic, cognitive, andmore—that present resources and challenges for teachingand learning. Further, it offers a particular reminder thatthe instructional triangle of classroom life resides in—andreflects—multiple contexts beyond the classroom.

As Figure 1 suggests, these three relationships intersectand intertwine in practice. However, each relationship placesa different aspect of the instructional triangle at the center,and each tends to emphasize a different central purpose forprofessional development activity. Subject-specific profes-sional development focuses principally on the depth ofteachers’ subject-teaching expertise and how it might serveas a scaffold for children’s learning, aided by well-designedcurricula and instructional resources. Professional develop-ment focused on children’s thinking and student work turnsattention to the nature and progression of children’s learn-ing (in general and in particular subject areas) and themeaning they make of instructional activities and materials.Finally, professional development focused on student char-acteristics and conditions highlights teachers’ knowledge ofhow those characteristics and conditions affect students’success in learning and how teachers’ response matters.Together, the three suggest a broad set of foundational con-cerns and priorities for professional development.


Figure 1. Professional Development and theInstructional Triangle

Source: Adapted by the author from Cohen, Raudenbush, and Ball (2003).

Contexts of teaching

Teachers’ knowledge of

students’ thinking and

content learning


subject content for teaching


diversestudents

LEARNING

Student Teacher

Content

Building Subject Knowledge for Teaching and LearningIn the last decade and a half, perhaps the most importantdevelopments in teaching and professional developmentcenter on expertise in specific domains of subject teach-ing. As teachers attest and research amply demonstrates,simply knowing a subject is not sufficient for knowinghow to teach it. Nor is familiarity with a generic set of ped-agogical routines sufficient for teachers to manage thesubject-specific complexities that arise as students grapplewith new concepts or skills.

The term pedagogical content knowledge, coined in themid-1980s by Shulman (1986, 1987), captures a notionthat dates to John Dewey in the early 20th century: thatteachers must find a way to connect the subjects they teachto students’ ideas and experience in ways that yield deepconceptual understanding and build skill and competence.Broadly defined, pedagogical content knowledge is thepractical knowledge that enables teachers to transform thecontent and epistemology of a subject discipline for pur-poses of teaching.

Convincing evidence regarding the importance of ped-agogical content knowledge comes from studies that rangefrom small-scale, quasi-experimental investigations ofteacher change to large-scale survey studies of content-focused professional development. Together, these experi-mental and survey-based studies support certain conclu-sions about the importance of subject-focused profession-al development and about the most effective features ofprofessional development design.

In one experimental project designed to help elemen-tary teachers with the teaching of fractions, researchersdesigned activities focused on the underlying mathematics,the specific math curriculum, children’s mathematicalunderstanding and motivation, and student assessment,including the use of student work and classroom videos toilluminate children’s mathematical thinking and develop-ment (see Saxe, Gearhart, and Nasir 2001). Projectresearchers developed three professional development con-figurations. Teachers in the first group participated in anintensive program that included the full set of content-focused activities, facilitated by the project developers; asecond group received the curriculum materials and par-ticipated in an implementation support group, but did notexperience the structured activities; and a comparisongroup taught as usual. The most significant effects on stu-dent learning and the most uniform shifts in teaching prac-tice were associated with the group having the most inten-sive and integrated approach to looking at mathematics,

children’s understanding, and assessment. Other studies ofspecific programs, primarily in mathematics and sciencebut also in literacy and history, offer similar findings.2

Large-scale survey studies reinforce the findings fromthese small-scale, program-specific experimental studies.In a detailed survey of professional development partici-pation and classroom practice in mathematics reported byCalifornia elementary school teachers, Cohen and Hill(2001) found that the more that professional developmentfocused in depth on mathematics curriculum, instruction,and assessment (e.g., by working with teachers to under-stand and prepare for the use of replacement units), themore teachers’ classroom practice reflected an ambitiousconception of mathematics teaching. Schools where teach-ers reported the most ambitious practices of mathematicsinstruction were also those with higher student achieve-ment in mathematics.

Findings from an evaluation of the large, federally fund-ed Eisenhower Professional Development Program in mathand science further help to specify the characteristics of“high-quality professional development” in content areas.In a three-year study of teachers in 30 schools in five states,researchers investigated the extent to which professionaldevelopment accounted for reported changes in classroompractice. In a paper summarizing the study, Desimone andothers (2002) reported that teachers with the highest levelof participation in particular kinds of subject-focused pro-fessional development also showed the greatest changes intheir reported math and science practice. Taken together,these studies underscore the likely benefits of content-focused professional development compared with otheremphases. They also point to the conditions under whichthose benefits are likely to be realized.

Sustained Focus on Subject TeachingProfessional development with a sustained focus on sub-ject teaching—strongly tied to the curriculum, instruc-tion, and assessment that students would encounter—produces the most consistent effect on subject teachingand student learning.3 Other professional development


2 An exhaustive review of this literature is beyond the scope of this paper.Among the research reviews, see Wilson and Berne (1999); Kennedy (1998);Little (2004); Randi and Zeichner (2004).3 In research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, professional developmentfocused on generic pedagogical practices was shown to have measurableeffects on students’ basic skills (Brophy and Good 1986). More recentresearch suggests that the depth of student learning is related to the depthand subject-specificity of teacher learning. For a useful brief summary, seeCohen and Hill (2005).

emphases, such as using hands-on activities, organizingcooperative small groups, taking steps to increase genderequity, or preparing teachers for leadership roles, certainlyrespond to widespread interests and concerns. However,none of them shows a consistent relationship to teachers’conceptions of subject teaching or reported practices ofsubject teaching. Only the professional developmentfocused on subject knowledge for teaching does so.

Collective Participation, Active Learning, andCoherenceA focus on subject-teaching content thus appears to benecessary, but it is also insufficient. In the Eisenhowerevaluation studies cited above (Desimone and others2002), individual participation had less of an influencethan participation by a group of teachers from the sameschool, department, or grade level. Programs were alsomore effective when they afforded teachers the opportuni-ty “to become actively engaged” and were coherentlylinked to prior knowledge and other activities. Theauthors sum up:

Professional development is more effective inchanging teachers’ classroom practice when ithas collective participation of teachers fromthe same school, department, or grade; andactive learning opportunities, such as review-ing student work or obtaining feedback onteaching; and coherence, for example, linkingto other activities or building on teachers’previous knowledge. (p. 102, emphasisadded.)

Time Matters, but Only If Focused on the Right StuffCommon sense suggests that activities of greater durationwould yield more benefits. However, just as subject focusalone is insufficient to enhance teacher knowledge andpractice, so must greater investments of time be coupledwith other strategic and design choices. In the study ofCalifornia’s elementary teachers described above (Cohenand Hill 2001), teachers with the most sustained profes-sional development were more likely to pursue extendedmathematical investigations with their students, holdclassroom discussions about problems and their solutions,and have students write or talk about their mathematicalreasoning. The study’s authors emphasized that “timespent had a potent influence on practice,” but only if thetime was spent on content, curriculum, and student tasks(p. 88).

Similarly, the national survey of teachers conducted foran evaluation of the Eisenhower professional developmentprograms (Garet and others 2001) found that the “dura-tion” of professional development (defined both in termsof total contact hours and span of time over weeks ormonths) achieved its effect primarily through the greaterlikelihood that teachers would experience active forms ofprofessional learning and a coherent link between newprofessional learning, prior professional learning, and stu-dent learning standards in their state, district, and school.4

The principal lesson from this body of research is thatteaching to high academic standards requires subjectknowledge for teaching. This pedagogical content knowl-edge is most effectively developed through professionaldevelopment that combines a number of key features.Effective professional development is content-focused,active, collective, coherent, and sustained.

Focusing on Students’ Thinking and Evidence of LearningStudents produce a mountain of work in school each year,but only a fraction of those data are mined for instructionalguidance. (Supovitz and Klein 2003, p. 13.)

Most teachers say they learn from their experience withstudents and that they do so in the course of their dailywork. Yet few say they have the time or resources to standback from the daily fray and articulate what they havelearned—or how they have learned it. Few teach in cir-cumstances where their observations of students and theirexplanations of student success or failure form part of anongoing dialogue with colleagues or inform a school-levelassessment of teaching effectiveness. Even where such dia-logue occurs, it may be narrowed and constrained by anemphasis on measured achievement that limits considera-tion of the nuances of students’ thinking.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests thatsystematic attention to children’s thinking and learningwill pay off in improved classroom practice and studentoutcomes. As one recent review (Grossman, Schoenfeld,and Lee 2005) put it:

Effective teachers know much more than theirsubjects, and more than “good pedagogy.”They know how students tend to understand


4 By helping to specify the conditions under which “more time” matters,these two studies (i.e., Cohen and Hill 2001; Garet and others 2001) helpexplain why Kennedy’s (1999) review of professional development effects onstudent learning found minimal or inconsistent results with regard to theduration and distribution of professional development.

(and misunderstand) their subjects; theyknow how to anticipate and diagnose suchmisunderstandings and they know how todeal with them when they arise. (p. 205.)

This body of research includes studies of three mainsorts. A first category of research involves collaborativeclassroom assessment studies, in which teachers andresearchers have worked together to develop and validateassessments embedded in curriculum in core academicareas. These studies supply evidence of benefits to studentsand to teachers when assessment strategies are integratedinto instruction. Based on a review of collaborative assess-ment research and other quasi-experimental studies ofprofessional development, Little (2004) concluded that

These studies…provide evidence that groupswhose members systematically examine stu-dent work and student thinking were associ-ated with higher student learning gains, moreself-reported and observed change in teach-ing practice, and more growth in teacherknowledge than comparison groups wherelooking at student work was not a centralactivity. (pp. 104–05.)5

A second group of studies focuses on professionaldevelopment programs and other school-based activity inwhich teachers’ collective examination of student workand investigation of students’ thinking forms a principalresource for professional learning. These studies show howteachers’ fund of pedagogical content knowledge deepensas they pay closer attention to evidence of students’ think-ing as revealed both in classroom talk and in the work stu-dents produce. However, these same studies tend to showthat it takes time, support, and structured opportunity forteachers to develop productive approaches to collectingevidence of student thinking and learning, distilling whatmight be learned from it.6

A final category of studies has developed in the contextof whole-school reform efforts in which improved studentassessment plays a pivotal role. These studies provide

examples of whole-school, grade-level, and classroomassessments, together with accounts of how changes inassessment helped to advance an agenda of schoolwidereform and boost student achievement.7 Experiments inschool restructuring during the 1990s frequently entailedan emphasis on “authentic assessment” of student learn-ing, providing structured processes and instruments fordescribing, analyzing, and reporting on student progress.Examples range from the collective use of the PrimaryLanguage Record to chart and support children’s languagedevelopment in elementary schools to the public presenta-tion and review of student portfolios or senior projects atthe high school level (Darling-Hammond, Ancess, andFalk 1995).

These studies underscore the value that teachers attachto professional conversations anchored in student think-ing and performance. Altogether, this body of researchpoints schools toward more frequent and focused discus-sion of student learning data from a variety of sources thatrange from standardized test results to teachers’ accountsand artifacts of what children do, say, and produce in thecourse of everyday instruction. Two directions seem espe-cially promising for schools. One is to expand the qualityand variety of formative assessments at the classroomlevel; a second is to promote and organize collectiveinquiry into and discussion of student progress andachievement based on a range of evidence, including butnot restricted to standardized achievement measures.

Expanding Formative Assessment of Student LearningAssessment for learning is any assessment for which the firstpriority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose ofpromoting students’ learning. (Black and others 2004, p. 10.)

Formative assessment occurs in and through instruc-tion, with the fundamental purpose of providing teachersand students with information on the progress of learn-ing. Having reviewed more than 250 studies of formativeassessment, British researchers Black and Wiliam (1998)concluded that

innovations that include strengthening thepractice of formative assessment produce sig-nificant and often substantial learning gains.These studies range over age groups from 5-year-olds to university undergraduates,


5 For reports of specific studies, see Wilson and Sloane (2000); Wolf andGearhart (1997); Herman and others (2005).6 For examples of studies situated in formal programs of subject-specificprofessional development, see Kazemi and Franke (2004); Richardson(1994); Franke and others (2001). For an example of efforts to organizeschool-based conversations involving “looking at student work,” see Littleand others (2003).

7 For a collection of examples, see Darling-Hammond, Ancess, and Falk(1995).

across several school subjects, and over severalcountries. (p. 140.)

Based on what they characterized as a “wealth of evi-dence,” these authors (Black and Wiliam 2004) concludedthat the accumulated research strongly warrants an invest-ment in professional development aimed at expanding theuse of formative assessment in classrooms and schools:

Such improvements [in formative assess-ment], produced across a school, would raisea school in the lower quartile of the nationalperformance tables to well above average.Thus, it is clear that, far from having to choosebetween teaching well and getting good testscores, teachers can actually improve theirstudents’ results by working with the ideas wepresent here. (p. 11.)

Scholars in the United States also advocate a substantialincrease in the use of formative assessment as a means tostrengthen instruction and boost student learning. In arecent paper intended to inform programs of teacher edu-cation, Shepard and others (2005) concluded that effec-tively implemented formative assessment can improvestudent achievement as much or more than other power-ful interventions such as intensive reading instruction orone-on-one tutoring.

To yield such powerful benefits for teaching and learn-ing, formative assessment must be closely integrated ininstruction and must rest on a strong foundation of peda-gogical content knowledge in the subjects being assessed.Yet despite the potential power of formative assessment tostrengthen instruction and aid student learning, fewteachers have been prepared to make effective use of it—or to create the kind of classroom instructional environ-ment that is compatible with it. Shepard and others (2005)warned that the majority of teachers have limited knowl-edge of formative assessment strategies, tending to thinkof assessment primarily for purposes of grading (see alsoHerman and others 2005).

Similarly, Black and Wiliam (1998, p. 141) observedthat the gains in student learning associated withincreased use of formative assessment require practicesthat remain relatively scarce in “normal” classrooms. Theauthors remarked on the current “poverty of practice” andargued that developing the necessary practices and per-spectives would entail “sustained programs of profession-al development and support” (p. 146).

Altogether, then, the available research provides persua-sive evidence that schools would benefit by expanding theuse of formative assessment but that most face profession-al development challenges in doing so. Projects under wayin England and the United States provide some guidanceregarding effective professional development for formativeassessment. For example, Black and Wiliam (2004) workedwith teachers to develop specific classroom practices thatgenerate evidence of student learning, which in turninforms instructional modifications. Teachers participatedin nine one-day professional development events over aperiod of 18 months, interspersed with opportunities to tryout new approaches and to discuss their experiences andideas with project researchers. Researchers report that evi-dence collected from the teachers in the form of interviews,observations, and reflective writing indicates that theteachers achieved “very significant, often radical changes intheir instructional practices” (Black and Wiliam 2004, p.46) and that they attributed those changes to the profes-sional development in which they had participated. Thoseinstructional practices included the effective use of ques-tioning strategies to elicit student thinking and reasoning;student feedback that minimized the use of grades ormarks and emphasized the use of comments targeted tolearning goals and next steps in learning; and the develop-ment of peer- and self-assessment routines and norms.

Fostering Schoolwide Conversation aboutStudent Learning and Achievement At the school level, teachers increasingly are being asked toconsider evidence of student learning as a basis for estab-lishing instructional priorities. One mark of schools thatmake headway on the achievement gap appears to be theirpropensity to promote and organize conversations based inevidence of student progress. Symonds (2003) comparedschools that had made progress in closing the achievementgap, as measured by California’s Academic PerformanceIndex (API), with schools that had not. Drawing on aca-demic performance data and surveys from teachers in 32K–8 schools, Symonds determined that most schoolsdevoted attention to student assessment and most linkedprofessional development to high-priority areas, but thatthe gap-closing schools were home to a far more intensive,ongoing set of activities and conversations focused on stu-dent learning and instructional improvement.

Schools in Symonds’ (2003) study differed dramaticallyin the frequency with which they assessed student progressand with which they based staff discussions on studentperformance evidence. Nearly two-thirds of respondents


from gap-closing schools reported such activity a few timesa month or even weekly, whereas most teachers from otherschools reported such activity infrequently or never.Teachers in the gap-closing schools were much more likelyto work with school leaders who actively encouragedinquiry into the nature of the achievement gap and toreceive professional development that helped them craftinstructional responses to the problems targeted by the evi-dence in hand. Finally, the evidence-based conversations ingap-closing schools were not limited to the evidence yield-ed by external tests. Rather, they built a habit of assessmentdesigned to gauge growth in student learning and to helpteachers refine instruction. In effect, these schools devel-oped a collective capacity for formative assessment of stu-dent progress as a resource for their own decision making,although they credit the need periodically to take stock ofwhether and how well students have mastered particularconcepts and skills (summative assessment).

In a study of America’s Choice schools completed by theConsortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE;Supovitz and Klein 2003), researchers found teachers andadministrators making extensive use of multiple sources ofstudent learning data. Data sources ranged from the resultsof standardized tests to student portfolios, various kinds ofopen-ended assessments, and the use of “running records”in reading. Of these, school leadership teams reported theclassroom- and school-based assessments as most usefuland the state and district assessments as less helpful—mainly, it appears, because states and districts do not pro-vide timely feedback. The researchers attributed the effec-tive use of assessment and assessment-based conversationsin large part to school leaders, remarking that a culture ofinquiry had “taken root into the culture of the school,” andthat “the fingerprints of strong leadership are all over thedata activities in the schools in this study” (pp. 2, 18).

Preparing for Student DiversityTeachers’ understanding of their students and the relation-ships they form with those students remain central to thesuccess of the teaching enterprise. Classrooms areinevitably diverse places, and each class presents its ownnew possibilities, resources, and challenges. As we arereminded in a recent essay, “Teaching Diverse Learners(Banks and others 2005), “diversity is the nature of thehuman species, and students are and always have been dif-ferent from each other in a variety of ways” (p. 232).However, that essay goes on, through a series of compellingvignettes, to illustrate the difficulties that teachers face indeciding how best to respond to the kinds of diversity their

students present.8 Those vignettes—about the school’sresponse to a child’s developmental and learning difficul-ties; about feedback to a student who has produced trou-bling work; and about the special needs of English languagelearners—illuminate the magnitude of the task that teach-ers face in preparing to teach students whose backgroundsand perspectives may be very different from their own.

Added to the human complexities present in all teach-ing relationships, then, teachers in American schoolsincreasingly confront the challenge of understanding andbridging differences that historically have disadvantagedentire groups of children. Of course, enduring inequitieshave roots in political, social, and economic conditionsoutside the school. Nonetheless, research also shows clear-ly how the school and classroom are implicated in eithersustaining those inequities or interrupting them. Becauseschools and teachers matter, for good or for ill, andbecause tackling the disparity in outcomes proves so diffi-cult, schools have a stake in knowing what contributioninvestments in professional development might make.

Building on Successful Equity-Oriented Classroom PracticePortraits of successful classroom practice have multiplied.Studies of teachers who are effective in teaching studentsof color, children from poor families, children learningEnglish as a second language, or children with learningdisabilities supply concrete images of effective practiceand help to shape an agenda for professional development.These emerging portraits consistently underscore theimportance of the entire “instructional triangle” and itsrelations among teachers, learners, and content.

In a synthesis of the research on the knowledge, skills,and experiences needed for teaching diverse learners,Cochran-Smith (1997) also emphasized the importance offoundational subject-matter knowledge linked to teachers’shared commitments to students. She reported thatresearchers who have studied culturally responsive teach-ers, such as Ladson-Billings (The Dreamkeepers, 1994),and educators who have successfully led or taught in high-achieving urban schools, such as Meier (The Power ofTheir Ideas, 1995), find that one crucial element of teach-ers’ success rests in their “passion” for engaging studentswith important subject matter.


8 Teaching “diverse learners” may take the form of teaching in heterogeneousclassrooms or schools or teaching in settings in which the student enroll-ment is fairly homogeneous but the background of the students is differentfrom that of their teachers.

The same observation emerges from a two-year studyof 140 classrooms in 15 schools across three states (seeKnapp and Associates 1995). In that study, “teachers whowere most successful teaching for meaning [in high-poverty schools] were those with a deep knowledge ofsubject matter as well as a conception of students as activeparticipants in learning whose prior knowledge must beconnected to school subject matter” (Cochran-Smith1997, p. 39). In the classrooms of the most successfulteachers, students learned basic skills as tools to aid themin more ambitious tasks, such as writing extended texts,rather than as discrete, decontextualized skills. Knapp andAssociates (1995) wrote:

The more classrooms focused on teaching formeaning—that is, geared reading instructionto comprehension, and writing instruction tocomposing extended text—the more likelystudents were to demonstrate proficiencyin…reading comprehension and writtencommunication, all other factors being equal.

…Approaches to…reading and writinginstruction that emphasized meaning werelikely to work as well for lower achieving chil-dren as for higher achieving ones, and some-times better. (p. 142.)

These studies have special import when they demon-strate how shifts in classroom practice enhance students’success in “gatekeeper” domains such as early literacy andsecondary mathematics that tend to make or break stu-dents’ chances for future opportunity. In one such exam-ple, researchers traced the mathematics learning of 700high school students in three schools as they progressedthrough four years of high school (Boaler and Staples2005; see also Horn 2005). The researchers examined thenature of teaching that students experienced, the students’attitude toward mathematics, and the students’ mathe-matics learning. Among the three schools, the one with thehighest level of student diversity—an urban school with aculturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diversestudent population—produced the greatest surprises:

At the beginning of high school, “Railside”students were achieving at significantly lowerlevels than the students at the other two moresuburban schools in our study.9 Within twoyears, the Railside students were significantly

outperforming students at the other schools.The students were also more positive aboutmathematics, they took more mathematicscourses and many more of them planned topursue mathematics at college. In addition,achievement differences between students ofdifferent ethnic groups were reduced in allcases and were eliminated in most. By theirsenior year, 41 percent of Railside studentswere taking calculus compared with about 27percent of students in the other two schools.

At Railside, mathematics classes were calmand peaceful, with a high work-rate and fewbehavioral problems, and the ethnic cliquesthat are evident in many schools did notform. In interviews, the students told us thatthey learned to respect students from othercultures and circumstances through theapproach used in their mathematics classes.The mathematics teachers at Railsideachieved something important that manyother teachers could learn from—they pro-vided students from disadvantaged back-grounds a great chance of success in life andthey taught them to enjoy mathematics andto include it as part of their futures. (Boalerand Staples 2005, p. 1; see also Boaler 2004).

Boaler and Staples (2005) attributed Railside’s favorablestudent outcomes to a complex combination of practices andconditions, both in the classroom and among the teachers asa department. The research findings are consistent withother studies in pointing to the importance of the teachers’stance toward their subjects and their capacity to work withsubject learners in deep and flexible ways.10 The teachersfocused especially on algebra, creating a common curricu-lum in which core concepts were taught through problemswith multiple solution paths. Students were also helped touse mathematical language, graphs, tables, and other repre-sentations as tools to develop and express their reasoning.


9 The example of “Railside” school actually draws from two complementarystudies of the same school and teachers. In Boaler and Staples (2005), theschool is named Railside; in work published by Horn (2005) and Little (2003),it is called East High. “Railside” is used throughout as a matter of convenience.10 For additional case study examples, see Lee’s (1995) research on African-American students in an experimental high school English course andTharpe and Gallimore’s (1988) study of literacy practices that bridge homeand school in a program for native Hawaiian children.

In addition, the research findings at Railside are consis-tent with studies that point to the importance of collectiveparticipation in professional development and to sharedresponsibility for student learning and mutual supportamong colleagues. Drawing from the ideas of ComplexInstruction developed at Stanford University (Cohen andLotan 1997), the Railside teachers set about systematicallyand explicitly replacing the usual status order in the math-ematics classroom—one in which the students who per-form mathematical tasks quickly are the “smart” kids—with one in which many kinds of contribution are neededand valued. The teachers credit their ability to transformthe student culture of the math classroom in large part totheir professional development experience in adapting theequity principles of Complex Instruction in combinationwith their membership in a strong network of reform-ori-ented math educators and participation in reform-orient-ed mathematics professional development outside theschool. Meeting on a weekly basis, the teachers continuallyassessed students’ success and struggles, refined the cur-riculum, and helped each other with problems of teachingpractice (Horn 2005). The Railside math department issimilar to departments described by Gutierrez (1996) as“organized for advancement,” that is, organized to enhancestudents’ access to and success in rigorous academics.

From Exemplary Classrooms to Professional Development Therefore, a question arises: What kind of professionallearning opportunities equip teachers for “thinking peda-gogically about diversity” in ways that are both “academi-cally challenging and responsive to students” (Banks andothers 2005, p. 245)? In answering that question, we arehampered by certain difficulties. The first is the apparentscarcity of professional development focused on preparingteachers for student diversity—or at least the relatively lowrates of participation in the opportunities that do exist. Ina report by the National Education Association (NEA2003), only 40 percent of teachers surveyed reported hav-ing participated in professional development for “manag-ing diversity in the classroom,” compared with 82 percentwho reported participating in subject-matter professionaldevelopment, with substantially more participation byminority teachers (55%) than white teachers (38%).

A second difficulty is the apparent tendency to separateprofessional development for “diversity” or “equity” fromprofessional development designed to deepen subject-teaching knowledge. Much of the professional develop-ment (and corresponding research) targeted toward stu-

dent diversity has the effect of turning the instructionaltriangle into a set of parallel lines. The result is that teach-ers may acquire greater awareness of and sensitivity to stu-dent differences without understanding how to draw onthat awareness to engage students in particular subjects, orvice versa. As Cochran-Smith (1997) observed in a reviewof the research, “the teacher’s knowledge of subject matteris given little attention in the literature on teaching diversepopulations. Likewise, the teaching of culturally diverselearners is given little attention in the growing literatureon teaching subject matter” (p. 38).

An additional difficulty is that in comparison withresearch on subject-related professional development,there exists relatively little research on professional devel-opment designed to prepare teachers for student diversity.Even programs with extensive research on classroomimplementation and student outcomes (e.g., CognitivelyGuided Instruction or Success for All) tend to offer little orno research on teachers’ professional development experi-ence or teacher learning outcomes. Knight and Wiseman(2006) reported in a recent review of the literature thatstudies about the effects of professional development forteachers of diverse students provided too little detail aboutthe professional development activity itself to providepractical guidance for improving it.

The growing body of research on teaching diverselearners provides some clues for professional developmentin part by helping to specify the nature of the challengesteachers face and by identifying the kinds of knowledge,skill, and dispositions evident in successful classrooms andschools (e.g., Stodolsky and Grossman 2000). Thatresearch supports the importance of professional learningthat keeps all the relations of the instructional triangle inview, making explicit links between subject-matter prepa-ration and the knowledge, perspectives, and needs ofdiverse learners. As McDiarmid (1991) noted more than adecade ago, “Teachers’ capacity to evaluate the appropri-ateness of representations they make of their subject mat-ter depends, then, on their view of learners as well as ontheir understanding of the learners’ relationship to thesubject matter” (p. 263).

On the one hand, it seems unlikely that teachers work-ing only to strengthen their subject-teaching expertise willbe able automatically to detect, appreciate, and build on thediverse cognitive, cultural, and linguistic resources that stu-dents bring to the classroom. In a recent essay, Banks andothers (2005) organized their discussion of what teachersneed to know by illustrating what teachers must know anddo to create the “culturally responsive classroom” and the


“inclusive classroom.” By “culturally responsive,” theauthors meant classrooms organized to support the learn-ing of children from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, andsocioeconomic backgrounds. “Inclusive” referred specifi-cally to classrooms supportive of children with other “spe-cial needs” such as learning or physical disabilities. Bothnotions emphasize building on children’s knowledge andstrengths, accepting and capitalizing on differences, andcreating a classroom environment that is physically andemotionally safe for learning.11

On the other hand, it is unrealistic to expect teachers tofigure out independently how to transform subject-matterteaching on the basis of a newly found sensitivity to studentdiversity. Professional development is likely to be limited inits classroom effects if focused primarily on teachers’ aware-ness, attitudes, and generic pedagogical strategies.12

As a case in point, Sleeter (1997) completed a study ofthe classroom impacts of a two-year program of multicul-tural education, observing the professional developmentsessions and teachers’ classroom practice and interviewingteachers about what they had learned. Most teachersreported having developed a new level of awarenessregarding student diversity, becoming more sensitized todifferences among students and more knowledgeableabout multicultural education ideas. Some teachers mademodest—generally short-lived—changes in their use ofcooperative learning and in their attempts to interact withall students. Overall, however, the proposed teachingstrategies appeared only sporadically and rarely in thecontext of a core content area: “Few teachers substantiallyreconstructed their teaching in any discipline over the 2-year period” (p. 689). Furthermore, an analysis focusedspecifically on mathematics teaching found virtually noeffects of the professional development on teachers’ con-ceptions of mathematics curriculum or their instruction.Indeed, “most did not see much connection between mul-ticultural education and mathematics” (p. 686). Thesefindings indicate that teachers are unlikely to recognizeconnections between multicultural awareness and subjectteaching where they are not helped to develop themexplicitly and concretely in ways that deepen their com-mand of subject-teaching possibilities.

To create more responsive and inclusive classrooms, itappears, requires that professional development help teach-ers explicitly develop inclusive and culturally responsivepractices relevant to students’ success with the core subjectsthey teach. Studies of teachers like those at Railside suggestthat professional development will be most potent if it joinsan equity mission, teachers’ understanding of student diver-sity, strategies designed to open up students’ learningopportunities, and serious work on subject-matter teaching.

Everything we know about the nature of ambitious andsuccessful classroom teaching points toward taking theinstructional triangle seriously as the point of departurefor professional learning. In doing so, however, schoolstake on a task of considerable magnitude. The sheer mag-nitude of the task, and the fact that it is never-ending,points our attention toward the way in which the schoolitself is organized to facilitate teachers’ individual and col-lective efforts to deepen their teaching knowledge, fosterinquiry into student learning, and develop meaningfulsupports for all students.

Professional Community in Support of Teaching and LearningAt the very least, one must imagine schools in whichteachers are in frequent conversation with each otherabout their work, have easy and necessary access to eachother’s classrooms, take it for granted that they shouldcomment on each other’s work, and have the time todevelop common standards for student work. (Meier1992, p. 602.)

It does not take a newcomer long to take stock ofwhether the school’s professional environment is consis-tent with professional learning. Although multiple work-place conditions play a part,13 vigorous professional com-munities occupy a particularly central role in schools con-ducive to teacher learning. Ideally, professional communi-ties within schools are fundamentally oriented to prob-lems of classroom practice and linked to a variety of exter-nal sources of knowledge and support for teacher learn-ing. As we turn from the content of professional develop-ment to consider the process or the means, Figure 2 pro-vides a schematic overview that places school-based pro-fessional learning communities focused on problems ofclassroom teaching and learning at the center of a largerconstellation of learning opportunities.


11 Reviews by Banks and others (2005) and Cochran-Smith (1997) both offernumerous examples and citations to classroom research that spans severaldecades.12 Indeed, there is some evidence that professional development focusedprincipally on teachers’ awareness, attitudes, and sensitivity may have theunintended effects of reinforcing stereotypes (Grant 1991; Zeichner 1992;Zeichner and Hoeft 1996).

13 For discussion of the broader range of workplace conditions that bear onprofessional learning opportunity and teacher retention, see Johnson andothers (2004) and Little (1999).

What Professional Community Is and Why It MattersAs commonly used, the phrase professional communityrefers to close relationships among teachers as profession-al colleagues, usually with the implication that these rela-tionships are oriented toward teacher learning and profes-sional development. Although there are some variationsfrom study to study in how researchers define and charac-terize professional community, most definitions encom-pass the elements shown in Box 1.

The image of professional community has its origins inresearch on teachers’ workplace relationships and theirrelationship to school improvement. In one early exampleof such research, Little (1982) found that schools with“norms of collegiality and experimentation” were morelikely to adapt successfully to a major change (court-ordered desegregation) and to record higher levels of stu-dent achievement than schools where teachers worked inisolation and where norms of privacy and noninterferenceprevailed. In the highly collegial and improvement-orient-ed schools, teachers talked frequently with each otherabout their teaching and how to improve it. They spoke infocused, specific ways about classroom practice and


Figure 2. Linking Professional Community and Professional Development

Source: Author.

Box 1. Defining Elements of Professional Community

n Shared values and purposes, including sharedorientations to the teaching of particular subjects

n Collective focus on and responsibility for student learning, sometimes described as a“service ethic,” with regard to students’ learn-ing and well-being

n Collaborative and coordinated efforts toimprove student learning

n Practices supportive of teacher learning, includ-ing observation, problem solving, mutual sup-port, and advice giving—sometimes summed up as “deprivatized practice and reflective dialogue”

n Collective control over important decisionsaffecting curriculum.

Source: Grodsky and Gamoran (2003); Louis and Kruse (1995);McLaughlin and Talbert (2001); Secada and Adajian (1997).

Classroom teaching as a

source of problems of practice and insights into

student learning

School-based professional communities with common

goals forlearning from practice and improving instruction

Out-of-school

professional community: Networks,

partnerships, and informal

contacts

Professional development focused on

subject teaching knowledge,

student learning, and student

diversity

student learning; worked with each other to develop andshare classroom materials; observed each other teachwhen possible; were open to giving and receiving advice;and participated together in professional development,helping one another learn new ways of teaching.

Other studies produced similar results, showing thatschools benefited when teachers achieved high levels of col-laboration and adopted a norm of “continuous improve-ment.” Rosenholtz (1989) concluded that her sample of 78elementary schools could be divided into “learningenriched” and “learning impoverished” schools based onthe levels of collaboration, professional sharing, and advice-giving among teachers. Those in the learning-enriched cat-egory—with robust learning environments for teachers—were also more likely to have strong profiles of studentachievement. Schools engaged in whole-school restructur-ing during the 1990s were also found to produce higher lev-els of student achievement where teachers formed a profes-sional community oriented toward learning (Newmannand Wehlage 1995; Newmann and Associates 1996). 14

Over a decade or so, educators and researchers havegradually shifted from a language of “collegiality” and“collaboration” toward language centered on notions of“community,” linking a “community of learners” in theclassroom and “professional community” among teachers.Of those who write about professional community, manyhave referred to Wenger’s (1998) work on “communities ofpractice.” As Wenger defined it, a community of practiceexists when individuals are mutually engaged in a jointenterprise and over time develop a “shared repertoire ofways of doing things” (p. 49). Wenger described local com-munities of practice, but he also envisioned “constella-tions” of professional communities that link local commu-nities together with broader networks in shared enterpris-es. An example might be a school professional communi-ty that is linked with a professional association and a uni-versity partner—all working together on a more challeng-ing mathematics curriculum for the school.

Cultivating Professional Community for Teacher Learning and School ImprovementAs the research on teachers’ professional community hasevolved and matured, it has tackled a series of questions of

importance to school leaders: Are all forms of “profession-al community” beneficial for teachers, students, andschools? What conditions enable professional communi-ties to form and be productive? What goes on insideteacher communities that provides resources for teacherlearning? Each of these questions yields insights for culti-vating professional community.

Distinguishing “Strong Traditional Community”From “Teacher Learning Community”Much of the early research distinguished between collegial(strong) and isolating (weak) professional cultures andoffered compelling portraits of how some collegial schoolsor groups successfully pursued improvement. However, inschools, as in other organizations or in society more gen-erally, strong cultures are not necessarily innovative cul-tures. That is, groups or schools may prove to be “strong”from a social and political perspective (cohesive and adeptat securing resources), but “weak” as sources of improve-ment in teaching and learning.

Based on extensive research in public and private sec-ondary schools, researchers at Stanford’s Center forResearch on the Contexts of Teaching (CRC) found thatprofessional communities vary in significant ways.McLaughlin and Talbert (2001) differentiated between aweak professional culture, where classroom work remainsprivate and teachers “pass like ships in the night,” and astrong professional culture in which teachers share a set ofcommitments regarding teaching and learning. They fur-ther distinguish between two types of strong professionalcommunity. In tradition-oriented strong communities,teachers unite to preserve their preferred conceptions ofsubject and pedagogy even in the face of student failure.Teachers in these groups are held together by conservativeviews of a subject discipline, school curriculum, andinstruction, but display little in the way of collectiveresponsibility for student learning. Teachers in teacherlearning communities also share certain core views andcommitments but take a more dynamic and flexible stancetoward subject teaching and routinely question and chal-lenge teaching routines when they prove ineffective withstudents. Such communities embrace collective obliga-tions for student success and well-being and develop col-lective expertise by employing problem solving, critique,reflection, and debate (see also Gutierrez 1996; Horn 2005;Louis and Kruse 1995; Talbert 1995).

The CRC studies, other studies of whole-school reform(Newmann and Wehlage 1995; Louise and Kruse 1995), andanalyses of large-scale data sets all point to a high standard


14 A thorough review of this literature is beyond the scope of this paper. Takenmore or less chronologically, some of the contributions include Little (1982,1987, 1990); Rosenholtz (1989); Nias, Southworth, and Yeomans (1989); Littleand McLaughlin (1993); Siskin (1994); Louis and Kruse (1995); Newmann andAssociates (1996); Westheimer (1998); Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth(2001); McLaughlin and Talbert (2001); Achinstein (2002); Horn (2005).

for the kind of teacher learning community that is likely toboost student learning. In one analysis of a national dataset, Lee and Smith (1995) found measures of staff coopera-tion to be unrelated to student achievement, even though aspirit of cooperation is no doubt desirable from a workplaceperspective. However, student achievement in math and sci-ence was significantly higher in schools where teachersexpressed what the authors termed collective responsibilityfor student learning. Collective responsibility was defined interms of teachers’ expressed view that it was their responsi-bility to ensure that students learned and to help preventthem from dropping out or failing.15

Moving from a Culture of Privacy to Teacher Learning CommunityCreating and sustaining such a robust teacher learningcommunity is no small matter. The available research,although relatively small in quantity, points consistently tocertain perspectives and practices that must develop overtime and to the leadership required to nurture them.

First, portraits of robust teacher communities showteachers at ease with disclosing their teaching dilemmas,discussing them in depth, and helping one another craftsolutions to problems of teaching practice and studentlearning. In one recent study of teacher study groups(“critical friends groups”), looking closely at examples ofstudent work became the means by which teachers gaineda deeper appreciation for dilemmas that they and theirstudents faced (Little and others 2003).16 In one vignette,

Shelby, a high school health/science teacher,provided two samples of a persuasive essay shehad assigned as the culminating assignment ina mental health unit on violence and violenceprevention. Shelby was not satisfied that theessays had captured what she had hoped stu-dents would learn from the unit. Her col-leagues in the meeting, representing a widerange of subject fields, had all participated inprofessional development aimed at strength-ening “writing across the curriculum.” In

examining the student essays, they began torealize that they had an incomplete grasp ofwhat it meant for students to produce a per-suasive essay—and for teachers to assign andassess one. A math teacher mused, “Whatcomes to mind is how well do the studentsunderstand what is meant by a persuasiveessay?” and seconds later, “…because I’m notclear what is meant by a persuasive essay…”Those dual themes—what students under-stood and what the teachers understood as“persuasive essay”— were picked upthroughout the discussion, culminating inthis exchange:English teacher: Do you think maybe the kidsdidn’t get it?Shelby: Do you think maybe the teacher didn’tget it?! (Laughter.) (Little and others 2003, p. 189.)

Second, teachers move toward more robust forms ofteacher community if and when they find ways to air andexplore disagreement, acknowledge their differences, andtolerate conflict. Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth(2001), reporting on a three-year study of a projectinvolving high school English and history teachers, con-sidered this “navigation of fault lines” pivotal in the teach-ers’ gradual shift from what they termed pseudo-commu-nity to authentic community. In its initial stages, theauthors said,

A group may deny differences and proclaim afalse sense of unity.… With the formation ofcommunity, differences among participantscan be acknowledged and understood. Withsuch recognition comes the ability to usediverse views to enlarge the understanding ofthe group as a whole. (p. 989.)

Finally, case study research suggests that teacher groupsbenefit from the kinds of leadership or facilitation thathelp build the conditions outlined above—the ease in dis-closing problems and the disposition to dig into them, aswell as a growing acceptance of teacher-to-teacher initia-tive on matters of practice. Grossman, Wineburg, andWoolworth (2001) noted that teacher communitiesbecome venues for cultivating teacher leadership. A com-parable finding emerges from the study of critical friendsgroups cited above:


15 In this case, the term collective refers to the aggregate of individual meas-ures, but commonality of views (a high mean level and low variance on thereported items) suggests that a shared norm may be operating. That is, teach-ers in such a school would expect one another to take responsibility for stu-dent learning and would disapprove of those who do not.16 For more detail on this case, see Curry (2003). For other examples ofteacher groups developing the capacity for rich, productive conversationabout teaching and learning, see Clark (2001).

Where we saw evidence of group norms builton open discussion, constructive questioningand critique, it was where individuals tookthe initiative to establish a different kind ofconversation—one in which people couldpush on ideas and practice while still beingrespectful of one another. (Little and others2003, p. 190.)

Creating Resources for Learning inside Teacher CommunityNot all schools or groups that are committed to learningand improvement necessarily possess or create resourcessufficient to act productively on those commitments.Research that probes “inside teacher community” concen-trates on trying to uncover the kinds of distinctiveprocesses that characterize vigorous and effective teachercommunities—those, such as Will Rogers ElementarySchool or Railside High School’s math department, thatdemonstrably influence the quality of teaching and learn-ing. Although this research remains in its early stages, ithas begun to illuminate how even “collaborative” groupsvary in the variety and density of resources that teachersmarshal in their interaction with one another, and thusvary in their ability to sustain their focus on teaching prac-tice and student learning. In one recent comparisonamong highly collaborative groups (Little and Horn, inpress; Horn 2005), one group consistently emerged as apowerful site for teacher learning. What stood out in thisgroup of math teachers—all teaching algebra in detrackedclassrooms—was the sheer density of human and materi-al resources on which the teachers relied to focus theirattention productively on teaching and learning. In theironce-a-week after-school meetings, the teachers routinelydrew on three kinds of resources that distinguished themfrom other collaborative groups of math and Englishteachers.n Expectations and routines for extended talk about teach-

ing, or what Horn (2005) has called “episodes of peda-gogical reasoning.” In particular, a routine called“check-in” served not only as a coordination function(where are we in the semester curriculum?) but alsomore importantly, as a problem-raising and problem-solving function for novice and veteran teachers alike(Little and Horn, in press). Problems raised by individ-uals (“I started the geo-boards today and it felt likemayhem. It felt like no one understood.”) became thefocus of further “unpacking” questions and extendedtalk about possible interpretations of the problem and

approaches to solving it. On a novice teacher’s “may-hem” problem, teachers talked about what might haveproduced students’ unexpected response. Among thecommentaries from veteran teachers was this one:

When they get upset and they seem to be offtask and acting goofy, it usually is motivatedby “I’m so confused and the last thing I wantto do is admit I’m confused so I’m insteadI’m going to find a way to distract myself ordistract others so that I don’t have to face thefact that I don’t know how to do something.”So I always try to sympathize. (I may pretendto) be mad, like “You guys aren’t working!What are you doing?” And then I try to take astep back and think what are they afraid of,how can I make them feel comfortable withthat fear, what can I say or do to make themfeel like this is a safe place. And that usuallytakes me somewhere where it’s never fullysuccessful, but I see some successes and thenthat translates into other days that becomemore successful (Little and Horn, in press).

n Frequent and purposeful use of curricular resources.Teachers made active use of texts, binders of sampleproblems, manipulatives, and reference books, as theytalked with one another about what and how they wereteaching core concepts and how students responded.With a pile of transparencies ready at hand, they usedthe overhead projector to display problems and mapout approaches to teaching them (“So this graphic uphere sort of illustrates…”). They recorded and referredback to their own thinking about their goals for partic-ular problems and their instructional strategies.

n Plentiful, detailed examples of student work and teachingpractice. The face of the classroom was constantly pres-ent in the form of lesson plans, samples of studentwork, demonstrations and simulations of classroomteaching, teachers’ accounts of student response in theclassroom, teachers’ thinking aloud in detail aboutfuture classes, and even references to their observationsof one another’s teaching.

Fostering Professional Community at Multiple Levels and LocationsWhere might teacher community best be constituted ifit is to foster professional learning and influence studentlearning? Huberman (1993) has speculated that


professional community seems most likely to take root ingrade levels, departments, or teams “where people haveconcrete things to tell one another and concrete instruc-tional help to provide one another—where the contexts ofinstruction actually overlap” (p. 45). Yet schoolwideimprovement teams have also become widespread. Onerecent study suggests that the most productive stancemight be to foster professional community at multiple lev-els, with different expectations about what it mightaccomplish at each level.

In a two-year study of one innovative elementaryschool, Stokes (2001) showed how the staff of Will RogersElementary School structured opportunities to offer pre-cisely such multilevel inquiries. Each form of inquiryworked well to enable some kinds of learning or to tacklesome kinds of problems but was less well suited to others.The entire school staff engaged in what Stokes described as“whole-school assessment of learning outcomes,” develop-ing common benchmark assessments of students’ literacylearning and devoting a full week in midyear to examiningthe data. Inquiry at this level enabled the teachers not onlyto develop a common understanding of student progressin reading and writing but also to see that a gap remainedin race-based patterns of differential achievement andopportunity. This form of inquiry had an important moti-vational effect but could not supply teachers with suffi-cient insight to attack the gap and gauge their effective-ness. For this, smaller groups of teachers designed actionresearch projects that afforded an opportunity to experi-ment with changes in curriculum and instruction at gradelevel and to assemble evidence regarding the nature andextent of any change in student performance. This form ofactivity provided the kind of mutual support and peerpressure needed to persist with a difficult task. However, italso tended to expose teachers’ own uncertainties and toreveal differences in teachers’ beliefs about teaching andlearning. It was within a third inquiry context, whichStokes characterized as “individual reflection with small-group support,” that individual teachers created a moreprivate, voluntary forum in which they took up their indi-vidual concerns and problems. This was the forum, Stokesreported, that “enabled teachers to ‘say things you wouldn’tsay’ in other settings” (p. 148).

Stokes (2001) emphasized that no one strategy forintroducing and organizing inquiry satisfies all interests.No one approach encompasses all of the work of teacherlearning and instructional improvement. Further, to devel-op this constellation of activities required that the staffdevelop both normative capacity (“the staff ’s collective

embrace and enactment of values that support self-studyas an important kind of learning”) and technical capacity(“the structures, processes, knowledge, and activities bywhich the school staff does the actual work of inquiringinto their practices”) (pp. 150–51). These in turn requiredserious leadership work on the part of both the principaland the teachers. As Stokes observed, “inquiry generatespowerful learning—but also guilt and conflict” (p. 153).Staff continually navigated a tension familiar to observersof (or participants in) professional community—the ten-sion between individuality and the common good(Hargreaves 1993), or, put another way, between individ-ual and collective autonomy (Little and McLaughlin1993). The Stokes study suggests the kinds of benefit thatmight be realized by cultivating professional communityin ways that promote sustained attention to student learn-ing and teaching practice at multiple levels and locationsin the school.

Making the Most of External TiesSchools are busy places that easily become insular places.Individuals, organizations, and groups outside the schoolsometimes provide the stimulation and intellectual pushneeded to consider possibilities beyond those a schoolwould come up with independently. The strongest andmost generative professional communities appear to ben-efit from ties to external sources of ideas, material, andassistance. These include teacher-to-teacher networks,university-school partnerships, school networks, and spe-cial projects that join teachers with knowledgeable col-leagues and inform them about new possibilities ofimport to their teaching.

The growing pressure on schools to reduce the persist-ent achievement gap heightens the significance of externalties. Elmore (2005) described two schools that most layobservers would say are good schools. The teachers workedhard, and students appeared engaged in learning. Therewas a sense of internal accountability, and a great deal ofemphasis was placed on improving student performanceand closing achievement gaps. The school staffs did every-thing they knew how to do. Yet, despite their efforts, aftersome initial gains, student performance went flat, and theschools were designated as “failing.” To continue moving tohigher levels of performance, according to Elmore, theseschools needed external help and support for capacitybuilding commensurate with the demands being placed onthem. They needed help diagnosing and addressing crucialissues, such as raising the level of cognitive demand in les-sons and improving program coherence.


In sum, robust teacher learning communities stand outfor their relentless focus on student learning, studentexperience, and student success; their willingness to take(and tolerate) initiative on matters of teaching practice;and the value they place on the ideas, feedback, andresources they derive from ties to individuals, groups, andorganizations outside the school. Such communities arewell positioned as sites of ongoing teacher learning—andto seek and benefit from participation in well-designedprofessional development.

Linking Professional Development andProfessional CommunityAt their best, high-quality professional development andvibrant teacher community intersect to form strong foun-dations for the learning-centered school. In one of the ear-liest studies of professional development and school-basedprofessional culture, schools with strong, improvement-oriented professional communities were more likely tovalue and make use of coherent, long-term professionaldevelopment offered by the district (Little 1984). This andother studies suggest that no matter how well designed astructured program of professional development, its trackrecord of success in the classroom owes a debt to the qual-ity of professional community and other supports at theschool level (Wilson and Berne 1999; Stein, Silver, andSmith 1998; Little 1984).

At the same time, there is some indication that when aschool supports teachers’ participation in high-qualityprofessional development, it may also strengthen profes-sional community. In one recent summary of survey-based research (Grodsky and Gamoran 2003), the authorsconcluded:

Positive effects of school-sponsored profes-sional development on professional commu-nity obtain at both the school and individualteacher levels, suggesting that teachers whoparticipate in school-sponsored professionaldevelop benefit not only from their own par-ticipation, but from the participation of theircolleagues as well. (p. 1.)

The authors also acknowledged that the relationshipmay be the other way around (i.e., professional communityhas an effect on participation in professional development).

Overall, then, both case study and survey research suggestthat the relationships between professional developmentand professional community are likely to be reciprocal, with

good professional development stimulating or strengthen-ing professional community and professional communityproviding fertile ground for participation in professionaldevelopment.

Schools might more deliberately and profitably linkprofessional development and professional community by taking a two-part strategic approach. One element ofthe strategy focuses on investing time and money inteachers’ access to high-quality professional developmentboth inside and outside the school. Such investments rep-resent a departure from the conventional stance,described by one review (Wilson and Berne 1999) as “apatchwork of opportunities—formal and informal,mandatory and voluntary, serendipitous and planned—stitched together into a fragmented and incoherent ‘cur-riculum’” (p. 174). The second element focuses on creat-ing the kind of teacher workplace in which teachers expe-rience both structural supports for professional growthand an organizational culture or ethos conducive to pro-fessional learning. This element entails a mindset amongschool leaders that is consistently attuned to the impor-tance of teacher learning and to the various ways in whichlearning opportunities might be constructed in the fabricof everyday work.

Investing in High-Quality Professional DevelopmentSchools invest in teacher learning by prioritizing and sub-sidizing collective participation in formal programs ofprofessional development, inside and outside the school,that meet the criteria outlined above. These programs oractivities deepen teachers’ subject-teaching knowledge;equip teachers to attend carefully to student thinking andto collect evidence of their learning progress; and preparethem to understand and respond to student diversity. Suchinvestments might take the form of subsidized participa-tion by groups or teams in one or more of the ways dis-cussed below.

In-Depth, Sustained Professional Development inSelected Subject AreasTeachers often reserve high praise for professional devel-opment that is sufficiently concentrated (as in summerinstitutes) and sufficiently sustained (periodic, continuousopportunities across a school year or years) to achieve newunderstanding and to develop new patterns of classroompractice. Specialized summer institutes range from one tothree or more weeks, typically focused in the teaching ofspecific subject areas (e.g., writing or literature, math, sci-ence, and the arts) and sometimes involving a mix of


participants from schools, universities, or private industry.Such institutes and other long-term activities permit ameasure of content depth together with the kinds of pro-fessional exchange that are rarely possible in other kinds ofworkshop settings. In addition, long-term professionaldevelopment may involve partnerships with universities,reform organizations, or professional developmentproviders.

School or Teacher NetworksTeacher collaboratives and networks grew in size, visibili-ty, and influence during the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps themost long-lived and widely known exemplar is theNational Writing Project, but other well-documentedexamples exist in science, math, the humanities, and thearts. Lieberman and Miller (1996) posited that networksfill a need created “because schools are organized in waysthat often do not encourage the kind of frank discussionthat is necessary for inventing new modes of working withstudents” (p. 14). In these “intentional” but “borderless”learning communities, outside their own bureaucracies,teachers “find it easier to question, ask for help, or ‘tell itlike it is,’ rather than be fearful that they are exposing theirlack of expertise in a given area” (p. 15; see also Liebermanand Wood 2001).

Building Teacher Learning into the School WorkplaceSchools join professional development and professionalcommunity by strengthening the various naturally occur-ring niches where professional community might flour-ish—grade level groups, departments, and teams—and byallocating time, space, and dollars to other kinds of activ-ity that expand the opportunities for teacher learning inthe course of ongoing school life. This element of the link-ing strategy rests on an important premise: that the mostpromising forms of professional development are thosethat engage teachers in the ongoing pursuit of genuinequestions, problems, and curiosities, over time, in waysthat leave a lasting mark on their thinking and practice.The following paragraphs, without constituting anexhaustive set of possibilities, indicate some of the mostcommonly described approaches to organizing teacher-to-teacher learning opportunities at the school level.

Teacher Study Groups for Inquiry into Teaching and LearningSome schools, especially those affiliated with comprehen-sive school reform initiatives, have sought to anchor

teacher learning in organized teacher study groups. Insome cases, teachers are encouraged to frame research top-ics tied to school goals, priorities, or problems. In othercases, they are afforded complete independence in decid-ing what to investigate. Examples include the CriticalFriends Groups initiated by the Coalition of EssentialSchools, and the teacher study groups developed as anintegral part of the Atlas Communities school improve-ment model.17

Lesson StudyAdapted from a well-established practice in Japaneseschools, Lesson Study is a continuous cycle of actionresearch organized by teachers to improve curriculum andinstruction. It engages teachers in collaboratively planninga lesson on a key concept and in relation to shared goalsand then observing, critiquing, and refining the lessontogether. 18 The Standards in Practice (SIP) model, devel-oped by the Education Trust, also focuses on an analysis oflessons in relationship to academic standards. On the prem-ise that “students can do no better than the assignmentsthey are given,” the SIP process joins a review of studentwork with scrutiny of the corresponding classroom assign-ment (Education Trust 2003; see http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/SIP+Professional+Development). Participants inschool-based teacher groups bring an academic task andsamples of the student work that resulted from it. Theybegin by completing the assignment themselves and thenanalyzing the learning demands embedded in it and thedegree to which it is linked to relevant standards. Using theassignment and standards, they develop a scoring guide forassessing the student work and pose the question ofwhether a given sample of student work would “meet thestandards.” The eventual aim of reviewing student work isto turn attention back to instructional strategy—specifical-ly to the design of appropriate academic tasks.


17 Although the volume of research is not large, the available studies point toconditions that make such groups more or less productive. For example, seestudies of Critical Friends Groups by Nave (2000), Matsumura and Steinberg(2001), and Curry (2004). In addition, The Journal of Staff Development,published by the National Staff Development Council, has published numer-ous articles designed to help schools organize viable teacher study groups.18 The Lesson Study Research Group at Teachers College, Columbia University(http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/), has undertaken a set of case stud-ies aimed at understanding the possibilities and problems of Lesson Study inAmerican schools (Chokshi and Fernandez 2004; Fernandez 2002; Fernandez,Cannon, and Chokshi 2003; Fernandez and Chokshi 2002). For a list of theResearch Group studies, see http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/articles_papers.html.

Protocol-Based Conversation about Student WorkBy the late 1990s, various groups and organizations hadbegun to promote “looking at student work” as a focus forprofessional development.19 Several have developed struc-tured protocols to help teachers look closely at studentwork for evidence of student reasoning and understanding.Protocols are designed to stimulate and structure a conver-sation focused on what the work reveals about student rea-soning and understanding. According to one online sum-mary, “a protocol creates a structure that makes it safe toask challenging questions of each other” (see Looking atStudent Work, n.d., http://www.lasw.org/protocols.html).Research shows that protocols serve to organize and guidean unfamiliar and potentially threatening discussion—butthe discussion may lose its generative edge when protocolsare treated more like a script and less like a flexibleresource, adaptable to teachers’ own interests and goals.Further, most protocols in use are generic guides toprocess, taking no explicit account of the specific chal-lenges of teaching and learning in subject-matter domains(Curry 2003; Little and others 2003). (An example of a sub-ject-specific protocol is the Protocol for Looking at StudentWork in Reading Apprenticeship Classrooms, developed bythe Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd. (The protocolitself is unpublished; for project information and contacts,see http://www.WestEd.org/sli.)

Peer ObservationClassroom and school visitations figure prominently inteachers’ accounts of “getting started” with new ideas—especially when teachers are able to visit several differentclassrooms (or visit one classroom on several occasions)and spend time talking with the colleagues whom theyhave visited. Further, regular and focused observation andreal-time mentoring have been found to be important ele-ments of effective teacher induction programs. Yet observ-ing and being observed remain rare, and careful analysis ofteaching episodes is even more so. In one national survey,more than three-quarters of teachers expressed faith inobservation as a way to sustain reform—but fewer thanhalf (47%) said they had actually participated in any formof peer observation (Holmes and others 1995).

Video ClubsVideo technology is a relatively underexamined resourcefor teachers’ professional learning.20 Although usuallyemployed as part of formal professional development orpreservice preparation, it also has promise for use inschools where teachers can rarely manage to observe oneanother in “real time.” Video clubs demonstrate the bene-fit that teachers derive from a series of conversationsfocused on evidence from ongoing, situated classroomactivity. Where teachers are able to refrain from a quickleap to judgment about one another’s practice, and wheredeep conversations evolve, research provides testimony tothe benefits. One recent study found that “over time, dis-course in the video clubs shifted from a primary focus onthe teacher to increased attention to students’ actions andideas. In addition, discussions of student thinking movedfrom simple restatements of students’ ideas to detailedanalyses of student thinking. Furthermore, teachers beganto reframe their discussions of pedagogical issues in termsof student thinking.” (Sherin and Han 2004, 163). Schoolsinterested in this approach might find Teaching forUnderstanding: A Guide to Video Resources (Segal,Demarest, and Prejean 2006) a useful tool.

ConclusionThis paper builds selectively on the available research tosuggest where schools might make important stridesthrough investment in teacher learning. Its basic premiseis that when a school systematically supports professionallearning it is more likely to be effective with students.Schools that exhibit a high level of success with students,sometimes against considerable odds, tend to supply con-sistent portraits of work environments conducive toteacher learning. In these schools, teacher learning arisesout of close involvement with students and their work;shared responsibility for student progress; access to newknowledge about learning and teaching; sensibly organ-ized time; access to the expertise of colleagues inside andoutside the school; focused and timely feedback on indi-vidual performance and on aspects of classroom or schoolpractice; and an overall ethos in which teacher learning isvalued and professional community cultivated. Schoolleaders could go some distance toward creating such an


19 The Annenberg Institute for School Reform, together with the ChicagoLearning Collaborative, Harvard Project Zero, and the Coalition of EssentialSchools, has developed Web pages and practical guides to help teachers col-laboratively examine student work. For an example, see the Web sitehttp://www.lasw.org (Looking at Student Work, n.d.) and Allen and Blythe(2003); Blythe, Allen, and Powell (1999); Seidel and others (2001); Weinbaumand others (2004); and McDonald (2001).

20 Some of the earliest examples of video clubs were formed to aid theNational Board for Professional Teaching Standards as it developed criteriaand processes for assessing videotape samples of teaching practice (e.g.,Frederiksen and others 1998). Since that time, video has emerged as a moreintegral part of preservice and in-service teacher education (Lampert andGraziani 2003; Sherin and Han 2004; Sherin, in press).

environment by generating professional community, pro-moting and organizing activity that sustains a focus onteaching and learning, and ensuring that other workplaceconditions enhance rather than impede teachers’ profes-sional development and commitment to teaching.

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